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The market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies hit $2 trillion on Monday, hitting an all-time high and doubling in value in just three months amid a massive rally in the digital currency space.
Data from CoinGecko and Blockfolio show that the value of all cryptocurrencies surpassed $2.02 trillion midday Monday led by the rally in bitcoin, ether, and other altcoins.
“While $2 trillion in market cap is a sizable amount of value stored in the blockchain format, it is still less than 1% of the value that can be stored in that format, which means there is still much further to go in terms of both market cap and overall smart contract adoption,” Sergey Nazarov, co-founder of Chainlink, told Insider.
The new record came just a few months after the cryptocurrency market hit the $1 trillion mark for the first time in January. Since then, cryptocurrencies have become as valuable as Apple.
Bitcoin traded higher on Monday to $58,819, after flirting with $60,000 last week. The digital asset first hit a trillion-dollar market capitalization in February. When bitcoin rallies, other coins typically follow. Jeffrey Wang, Head of America’s at Amber Group, has called bitcoin the “de facto flag-bearer for crypto assets.”
On Friday, ether surged to an all-time high above $2,000, following in the wake of bitcoin’s rally. Decentralized finance or DeFi, is also spurring the rise of the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization. DeFi is an umbrella term for various applications that use public blockchains and crypto assets to disrupt the traditional financial sectors.
“The significance of this initial shift from centralized finance to decentralized finance cannot be overstated. As each additional use case for blockchain goes live e.g. insurance, real estate ownership, global trade, ad networks, etc. even more value will incrementally flow into the blockchain format,” Nazarov said.
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Originally published at https://www.businessinsider.com/crypto-market-cap-bitcoin-doubles-to-2-trillion-rally-surges-2021-4 on .
